Japan's most remote wilderness peninsula — UNESCO World Heritage, brown bears fishing the salmon rivers, Blakiston's fish owl hunting the old-growth forest, and drift ice from Siberia arriving each winter
Shiretoko (知床 — the Ainu word for 'the end of the earth') is a 70km peninsula on the northeastern tip of Hokkaido, extending into the Okhotsk Sea between Rausu (the eastern gateway town) and Utoro (the western gateway town). The Shiretoko UNESCO World Heritage Site (2005 — one of the few Japanese Natural Heritage Sites to be inscribed, the designation specifically recognizing the sea-land ecological connection and the Amur River nutrient cycle) covers the peninsula's core zone (531 sq km of wilderness with no roads penetrating the interior): the 5-peak volcano chain of the Shiretoko massif (S…
Shiretoko was the homeland of the Menoko clan of the Ainu people (the indigenous Jomon-descended people of Hokkaido and the Kuril Islands, speaking a language isolate unrelated to any other language family) who used the peninsula's rivers for salmon, the forests for deer hunting, and the sea for walrus and sea otter. The Japanese settlement of Shiretoko began in the Meiji period (1868-) as part of the systematic displacement of the Ainu from their traditional territories; the Ainu word Shiretoko (sir etok, 'the place where the earth protrudes into the sea') became the Japanese name for the pe…